Tisdale’s story was finished, but Miss Armitage waited, listening.  It was as though in the silence she heard his unexpressed thoughts.

“But her life was wrecked,” she said at last.  “She never could forget.  Think of it!  The terror of those weeks; the long-drawn suspense.  She should not have stayed in Alaska.  She should have gone home at the beginning.  She was not able to help her husband.  Her influence was lost.”

“True,” Tisdale answered slowly.  “Long before that day I found her, she must have known it was a losing fight.  But the glory of the battle is not always to the victor.  And she blamed herself that she had not gone north with her husband at the start.  You see she loved him, and love with that kind of woman means self-sacrifice; she counted it a privilege to have been there, to have faced the worst with him, done what she could.”

Miss Armitage straightened, lifting her head with that movement of a flower shaken on its stem.  “Every woman owes it to herself to keep her self-respect,” she said.  “She owes it to her family—­the past and future generations of her race—­to make the most of her life.”

“And she made the most of hers,” responded Tisdale quickly.  “That was her crowning year.”  He hesitated, then said quietly, with his upward look from under slightly frowning brows:  “And it was just that reason, the debt to her race, that buoyed her all the way through.  It controlled her there at the glacier and gave her strength to turn back, when the setter refused to come.  Afterwards, in mid-winter, when news of the birth of her son came down from Seward, I understood.”

An emotion like a transparent shadow crossed his listener’s face.  “That changes everything,” she said.  “But of course you returned the next day with a horse to do as you promised, and afterwards helped her out to civilization.”

“I saw Louis Barbour buried, yes.”  Tisdale’s glance traveled off again to the distant Pass.  “We chose a low mound, sheltered by a solitary spruce, between the cabin and the creek, and I inscribed his name and the date on the trunk of the tree.  But my time belonged to the Government.  I had a party in the field, and the Alaska season is short.  It fell to David Weatherbee to see her down to Seward.”

“To David Weatherbee?” Miss Armitage started.  Protest fluctuated with the surprise in her voice.  “But I see, I see!” and she settled back in her seat.  “You sent him word.  He had known her previously.”

“No.  When I left him early in the spring, he intended to prospect down the headwaters of the Susitna, you remember, and I was carrying my surveys back from the lower valley.  We were working toward each other, and I expected to meet him any day.  In fact, I had mail for him at my camp that had come by way of Seward, so I hardly was surprised the next morning, when I made the last turn below the glacier with my horse to see old Weatherbee coming over the ice-bridge.